Towards Explainable NLP: A Generative Explanation Framework for Text Classification

Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, William Yang Wang


Abstract
Building explainable systems is a critical problem in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), since most machine learning models provide no explanations for the predictions. Existing approaches for explainable machine learning systems tend to focus on interpreting the outputs or the connections between inputs and outputs. However, the fine-grained information (e.g. textual explanations for the labels) is often ignored, and the systems do not explicitly generate the human-readable explanations. To solve this problem, we propose a novel generative explanation framework that learns to make classification decisions and generate fine-grained explanations at the same time. More specifically, we introduce the explainable factor and the minimum risk training approach that learn to generate more reasonable explanations. We construct two new datasets that contain summaries, rating scores, and fine-grained reasons. We conduct experiments on both datasets, comparing with several strong neural network baseline systems. Experimental results show that our method surpasses all baselines on both datasets, and is able to generate concise explanations at the same time.
Anthology ID:
P19-1560
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5570–5581
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1560
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1560
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, and William Yang Wang. 2019. Towards Explainable NLP: A Generative Explanation Framework for Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5570–5581, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Explainable NLP: A Generative Explanation Framework for Text Classification (Liu et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1560.pdf